Elton Romeo Smilie, the not-quite discoverer of ether anesthesia.

Like William T.G. Morton, Elton Romeo Smilie (1819-1889) was raised in Massachusetts, attended medical school in New England, practiced dentistry there, strove for clinical invention, and moved to Boston. In October 1846, both announced that inhaled ethereal preparations achieved reversible insensibility in surgical patients. Smilie published a report in the Boston Med Surg J 3 wk before Bigelow used that forum to broadcast Morton's Ether Day. Smilie's preparation was an ethereal tincture of opium, and, as he mistakenly believed the opium to be volatile and important, he ceded priority to Morton for ether anesthesia. The two authors collaborated on chloroform, but Smilie soon headed off in the Gold Rush to California. It is tempting to speculate that Charles T. Jackson and Morton were indebted in part to Smilie.

George Washington Frost Mellen and Resuscitation with Nitrous Oxide in 1847.

In The Boston Medical and Surgical Journal of 1847 (later to be called The New England Journal of Medicine), Boston chemist George Washington Frost Mellen claimed that inhaled nitrous oxide gas supports human life in the manner of oxygen gas, and he proposed the use of nitrous oxide in resuscitation from drowning and from carbon monoxide poisoning. The claim was reprinted in at least one dental journal and was long cited as justification for the use of 100% nitrous oxide for inhaled anesthesia. Advocates included anesthesia pioneer and painless dentist Gardner Quincy Colton. Though misguided as to nitrous oxide, Mellen was a prominent member of the Boston community for the abolition of slavery.